Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1980, Side 204

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For this ‘formule commune dans les recueils carolingiens’, see Wilmart, Precum
libelli, pp. 16, 140; Idem, Le manuel, p. 285, no. 44. The most easily accessible edition
is that of the ninth-century Fleury prayer book, PL 101, col. 1400B.
Marturi (see Lemarié 1981, no. 43), like our Icelandic manuscript, contains this
prayer in its traditional form, while Ztirich and Alpirsbach, nearly identical, insert a
proper text after orate pro me.
In Marturi, this is the second prayer to all the Apostles. The first choice is the long
prayer ‘Domine Iesu Christe qui dedisti potestatem apostolis tuis infirmos curare’, found
with variant readings in the Canterbury psalter, Brit. Mus. MS Arundel 155, of the mid-
eleventh century; see Lemarié 1981, no. 42.
Bremen, after the Alpirsbach text, includes a second prayer to all the Apostles:
Omnes sancti apostoli dei quibus ipse tradidit potestatem ligandi atque soluendi.. .
cunctisque fidelibus defunctis requiem tribuat. ipse qui in trinitate perfecta viuit et
regnat deus. Per omnia secula.
= The Pontifical of Hugues de Salins, ed. Lemarié 1978, p. 414, no. 56.
Among the examined series, our Icelandic manuscript has a relation-
ship only to the Italo-German group of manuscripts. Of our 13
prayers, the prayer to St. Paul (no. 2, not found in Marturi), to the two
St. James’s (nos. 4 and 6), to St. Thomas (no. 8), and to St. Simon
(no. Il), five in all, six with the concluding prayer to all the Apostles
(no. 14), have been identified in these series. For a table of our main
series, where texts found in more than one manuscript have been
italicized, see p. 187. Where two different prayers are directed to the
same apostle, they have been distinguished by the addition of a
numeral (1, 2).
Within the Italo-German group, Marturi alone, though with one
prayer less in common with Iceland than the others, comes out, if not
as its model, at least as its closest relation. Only Marturi and Iceland
present the prayers in the shorter, almost litanic form, without
intermediary chants and collects. There is also a textual relationship
between Marturi and Iceland, e.g. the reading dubietatis in the prayer
to St. Thomas (no. 8), where the others have ambiguitatis. They
represent respectively the southernmost and the northernmost extension
of a tradition which must needs go back to the eleventh century. Does
their common ancestor reflect the terror of the millennium, with their
piea for intercession on Judgement Day?
In the late eleventh century the Marturi prayers were adopted by the
composer of the Ztirich Cursus Apostolorum, but with a difference. In
Ztirich, the sense of doom is alleviated by a second piea of interces-
sion, shot through with hope and trust. The Ztirich form of the prayers
partly reappears in Alpirsbach-Bremen.